Mrs Dalloway Read Online Free

melting in the sky’ (p. 23) are signs to him from the gods, apocalyptic messages that call on him to be the messiah. In its final arc, the plane is compared to Shelley’s skylark, ‘curving up and up, straight up, like something mounting in ecstasy, in pure delight,’ while ‘out from behind poured white smoke looping, writing a T, an O, an F.’
    Gillian Beer has wittily described this passage as an erotic and playful one in which ‘toffs and toffee are lexically indistinguishable, farts in the wake of lark, of sexual rapture.’ 19 Virtually as soon as the aeroplane was invented it entered people’s dreams as a symbol of sexualexcitement, according to Freud. Moreover, skywriting was a brand-new phenomenon when Woolf was composing her novel. Invented by a British aviator, Major Jack Savage, ‘aerial sign-writing’ made its debut in London in August 1922. On 18 August, the London
Times
headlined:
    Sky Writing by Aircraft
Wide Scope in War and Peace
Simple Means of News Broadcasting
    â€˜If not in every part of the country,’
The Times
reported, ‘at least for a hundred miles around London the writing of advertisements in the sky by aircraft has been seen by millions of people.’ In New York that November, crowds watched in awe as the ‘flying smoke writer,’ Captain Cyril Turner, demonstrated the new invention by writing ‘Hello, USA!’ in the sky over Manhattan. By 1923, sky-writing was an important advertising device for the
Daily Mail
, and in the evenings city workers could see its name written in the sky ‘in giant letters of orange and silver.’ 20
    Planes, cars and movies are among the most conspicuous signs of modernity, and such references, along with Woolf’s explicit repudiation of her Edwardian predecessors encouraged many critics to read
Mrs. Dalloway
as a textbook of modernism, ‘a work conceived in response to the state of the novel, a consciously “modern” novel.’ 21 In an introduction to an American edition of
Mrs. Dalloway
in 1928, Woolf herself noted the way it had been seen as an illustration of her theories of fiction: ‘The author, it was said, was dissatisfied with the form of fiction then in vogue, was determined to beg, borrow, steal, or even create another of her own.’ 22
    But great novels are not written from theoretical blueprints. Woolf herself firmly denied that the book had its genesis in a theory of literature, or that it was ‘the deliberate offspring of a method.’ Instead, she explained,
    . . . the idea started as the oyster starts or the snail to secrete a house for itself. And this it did without any conscious direction. The little note book in which an attempt was made to forecast a plan was soon abandoned, and the book grew day by day, week by week, without any plan at all; except that which was dictated each morning in the act of writing . . . it was necessary to write the book first and to invent a theory afterwards. 23
    We know a great deal about the beginnings and the gradual textual evolution of
Mrs. Dalloway
. Woolf’s working notes are preserved at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and her draft in the British Museum. 24 There is also a typescript of a discarded chapter, ‘The Prime Minister’, and the seven short stories published as
Mrs. Dalloway’s Party
. 25 Moreover, Woolf commented extensively on the progress of her novel in her journal, and discussed it in letters to friends. By reconstructing her writing process, we can see her hard slow labour to find a language and form for her vision.
    Clarissa Dalloway and her husband Richard are characters who originally appeared in Woolf’s first novel,
The Voyage Out
(1915). There they are slightly comic figures. Clarissa is ‘a tall slight woman, her body wrapped in furs, her face in veils’, with artistic tastes and inclinations, but no brain whatsoever. 26